OPEN

Sifting through my feeds yesterday, I came across two blog posts from two ostensibly very different bloggers on the same topic: why they blog.

Now, blogging about blogging comes dangerously close to navel gazing, I know, but these two have interesting things to say.

On the one hand there is James Gardner with his Bankervision blog, Head of Innovation at LloydsTSB, a major UK bank, reflecting on the question of where he gets the time (and implicitly in that question, why he bothers).

And on the other there is Fraser Nelson, political editor of the Spectator, a right wing politics and business magazine in the UK. In the just over a year since the magazine started its Coffee House blog, he “had no idea I’d end up writing far more as a Coffee House barista than for the magazine”.

Their reasons and their blogging pay-offs are interesting to compare and contrast. For Gardner the pay-off has been access and attention – both within his organisation and in competitors’ organsiations, both of which have helped his work. Without the blog he might not have had a way to “reach out to other banks. I’ve had lots of banks come through to London to visit us, and the value of those visits is extremely high (for both parties I hope).”

In a way by blogging he put part of his and his bank’s thinking into the commons, into a neutral place where everyone who was interested could add a little to the conversation, benefitting them all.

“There’s always this fear that whenever anyone speaks in public, we’re in danger of giving away the game to competitors. But I’ve found that when you keep things secret, it actually takes much more effort to get things to happen. Talking about things creates the reality. Doing social media has made a lot happen here at the bank.”

There’s something else for Gardner as well – he says that social media helps to avoid “the Curse of the Incumbency – while still being in-house he gains awareness of how things are working elsewhere:

“The Curse is the situation where stakeholders turn to outside consultants rather than relying on internal knowledge. There is quite a lot of validity in this, by they way. Consultants have the advantage of seeing how many institutions work. But through this blog, so do I.”

Meanwhile the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson’s basically a self-proclaimed addict. What’s the drug? He reckons it’s all down to the comments:

There’s something gratifying (and, I admit, addictive) about writing an idea at 2pm and having CoffeeHousers – a strikingly smart, diverse, eloquent and well-informed group of people – comment by 2.15pm. And if I’m trashed, it’s normally for a good reason. In newspapers, writers normally get only two forms of feedback: promotion or a P45.

So what he gets is the best feedback on his writing and his thinking that he’s had in years. He needs a thick skin to take some of the spicier assaults on his arguments and style, but it’s worth it. For someone who is serious about political debate he sees the blog as somewhere his views are challenged, honed, refined: “the flabbier points in my arguments are noticed and skewered”.

Last word on blogging, touchingly, to Fraser Nelson: “My wife says she can tell when I’m blogging, because I smile when I type.”

I never noticed it before, but I do too.